ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

1aSP1. Why speech coding isn't dead.

Richard V. Cox

AT&T Bell Labs, 600 Mountain Ave., Murray Hill, NJ 07974

The costs of communications bandwidth and data storage declined
dramatically during the past decade while their available capacities increased
equally dramatically. Both trends will continue into the future. In spite of
this, the decade saw a proliferation of speech coding applications and new
standards. Why isn't speech coding dead? The answer has several parts. First,
digital electronic technology has finally made speech coders easy and cost
effective to implement. Second, customer demand for communications any place
any time relies on speech coding. In the future, one can expect more, not less,
demand for speech coders used in new products and services. Third, speech
coding technology improved to the point where good tradeoffs could be made
among speech coder attributes, such as quality, complexity, bit rate, and
delay. New products and services were acceptable to consumers on the basis of
both performance and cost. However, current speech coders can still use
improvement in all of their attributes. This talk reviews current application
areas and focuses on areas for potential improvements to current speech coders.
New applications areas and meeting their challenges will continue to make
speech coding a lively research topic and a commercially valuable technology
for the future.